The histories of state formation and capitalism in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil are interwoven into the meteoric rise and fall of slavery in these countries after 1780. Very early in the history of the professionalization of the historian's craft, locally based scholars of the US South, Brazil, and Cuba had to explain slavery to provide a national narrative. Thus, the largest and oldest cumulative volume of slavery studies in the Western Hemisphere, perhaps with the exception of the British Caribbean, is focused on the nineteenth century in the US South, Brazil, and Cuba. The conceptualization of “Second Slavery,” as a distinct phase in the relationship between slavery and capitalism, is a successful reinvention of this scholarship by Dale Tomich and an international group of scholars whose contributions are gathered in this book.
Throughout this volume, the authors grapple with how to bridge scholarship from economic history, and from historians who venture into economic history but work outside its realm as a discipline. Also, the contributors examine the interventions of Marxist historiography in the analysis of nineteenth-century slavery in each of these countries as well as new perspectives coming from World-Systems theory à la Wallerstein (including dependency theory as practiced by Latin American intellectuals) and world history as practiced in the United States.
This is a book about the history of historiography and the theory of history, with some exciting historical examples as vignettes. Thus, the audiences for this volume are scholars and graduate students who intend to specialize in the history of slavery. A brief introduction by Tomich underlining some characteristics of the “Second Slavery” opens this book. Robin Blackburn continues this task in the essayistic (ensayístico) first chapter. After a dated view of what slavery was before 1800, Blackburn identifies some of the new characteristics of the “Second Slavery:” the autonomy of the planter elites, the lifting of colonial trade restrictions, the use of new land and technology, and the development of new banking systems supporting the expansion of plantations. His contribution rightfully points out the centrality of the United States in the remaking of slavery. One wonders if the concept is a way to recast the historiography of the Plantation US South into Atlantic and World Historiography during a time of quantifiable historical acceleration—the nineteenth century.
The second chapter by Tomich is the most exciting in terms of the theorization of slavery. Examining some works by Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, Alfred Conrad, John Mayer, Eric Williams, Seymour Dresher, and David Eltis, among others, Tomich critiques the tenets of how neoclassic economic historians analyze slavery and introduces Marxist alternatives and conceptualizations of World-Systems theory. It is impossible to synthetize this contribution in a paragraph and, at the same time, do justice to the author's work. Even though many readers will disagree with Tomich, it is undeniable that this chapter offers a lot to unpack as well as material for fruitful reflection.
The contributions by José Antonio Piqueras, on the one side, and Rafael Marquese and Ricardo Salles, on the other, should be assigned as mandatory reading to graduate students specializing on slavery in Latin America. These are the best historiographical essays on nineteenth-century Cuban- and Brazilian-based slavery scholarship—not just on economics and state formation, but also on the whole of nineteenth-century slavery in these countries. They also examine how scholarship produced in the United States (and its timing), as well as the many itineraries of local scholars, shaped the historiographical field in Brazil and Cuba. While the essay of Piqueras lacks some structure, the chapter of Marquese and Salles is more organized, and it tries to create a chronology of the “Second Slavery.” In the latter case, these Brazilian historians examine what is new about this second slavery in relation to the previous and very long history of slavery in Brazil. Again, many readers will disagree with some of the claims here, but these chapters delineate a careful and dynamic map of who's who and the connections of scholars and debates in Brazil and Cuba.
The last chapter, by the recently deceased Anthony E. Kaye, is a reprinted article possibly placed here instead of a more recent contribution truncated by his departure. The author challenges Southern historians to go beyond the boundaries of the antebellum South to examine more deeply slavery during the early US republic, as well as look closely to connections, comparisons, and entanglements with Cuba and Brazil. Kaye targets “southern exceptionalism” with a healthy dose of comparative slavery studies.
This book deserved a better editorial process, as some of the bibliographies accompanying chapters have different styles, and chapters differ from each other in terms of endnotes and footnotes. In addition, some graphs lack legends or captions, and some of the contributions need a smoother styling in English. Given that I am a non-English speaker working in the United States with colleagues living in Latin America and beyond, I know this requires extra work. But this editorial labor is important for conveying the subtle differences of historical understandings, theory, and the history of historiography in slavery studies, as in any transnational field.
